The site for the class is on Blackboard at the school, and you have to log into get the materials, so it’s not publicly visible. Pretty sure it’s against the honor code to share them online, otherwise I would.

I appreciate your interaction here on the site and hope you will get something out of watching my struggles! :)

In terms of math help, one site I’ve found that helps is Wolfram Alpha. When I get stuck, I can sometimes paste in what I’m doing there and get some visualizations and explanations that help. (Though the free version is somewhat limited.) I often google a topic and find lecture notes from schools that post them publicly (probably not always on purpose!), so sometimes that helps to get an alternate explanation.

Khan Academy is good for the more straightforward statistics stuff, and sometimes I can find videos on YouTube explaining more advanced concepts, so it’s always worth looking!

But yes, I’m spoiled to have an in-house tutor :)

Thanks, Renee! I appreciate you reminding me of Bishop’s book. I have it, but didn’t get far into it, and had forgotten about it.

It did strike me as pretty dense, and pretty mathematical – but very good. I’ll give it another go.

Wow, you are so lucky to be married to a physicist, who can help you with the math! I’m afraid that, although I have a few comp sci friends, I don’t have any that can really help me with heavy math. I’m stuck with trying to find online resources and/or books, but it’s really hard to know what to read/buy.

I’d love to know any math resources that you have found helpful, books or online.

It inspires me that you were able to “Show that the Gamma distribution is appropriately normalized” in four pages of math. I’m geeky enough to aspire to be able to do that some day!

Thanks also for the advice on taking the class. I probably wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway right now, but good to know I’m not missing out on a ton. Does the class have a decent site?

It’s nice, as well, to read about someone whose trying to learn all this stuff while holding down a full-time job — owning your own firm, no less. As someone who’s struggled through designing fully-normalized databases (as well as dimensionally-modeled ones as well), that encapsulate as much as possible the business logic in the design, I appreciate that that is quite a feat as well.

Hi Scott! Thanks for the comment! I’m about to post tonight or tomorrow with a little more progress.

The textbook has been helpful with the mathematical side of things so far. It’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by C. Bishop. However, I’ve had to do a lot of online research to really “get” most of what is being said in class. Luckily, I am married to a physicist, and he has been really helpful with explaining the math, too!

Unfortunately, I don’t feel I get a lot of support, even though I’m in “real” courses. Being an online student alongside in-class students is difficult in terms of getting support. Sometimes the professors forget we’re there, though my ML prof has been good so far, but not being able to stop by a prof’s office and just talk things over, or work through problems with other students in person really adds a level of difficulty.

I’m in the CGEP Systems Engineering program at UVA. Honestly I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, it has been a struggle to enroll in courses and get any kind of support. I have had some classes at ODU and they are definitely more supportive online so far, but it’s still tough with topics this advanced!

I’ll continue to post resources as I find them!